Method and means for browsing by walking

ABSTRACT

A mobile station is arranged to determine its location, which is searched against street addresses from a database, and at least one matching street address is retrieved. The street address is searched on the mobile station and/or over the network. The search engine conducts a search in the mobile station file system and/or the Internet and/or a file system over the network with the at least one query term, —at least one search result is arranged to be displayed to user on the screen of the mobile station. This facilitates on-demand effortless Mobile Internet Search that allows the users to access opportunities that they did not know about, or would not have had time to find out about with minimum effort as the software of the mobile phone is scanning the Internet and information pages for these opportunities and displaying the results dynamically on the mobile phone screen.

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a division of copending application Ser. No.13/021,244 filed on Feb. 4, 2011. The entire contents of each of theabove-identified applications are hereby incorporated by reference.

TECHNICAL FIELD OF INVENTION

The invention relates to people browsing the Internet by walking todiscover search results as they come near them. In more particular, theinvention relates to browsing pages of information based on location andprofile, and conducting “on the spot” commercial transactions that mayinvolve payments.

BACKGROUND

Urbanisation and globalization progress inevitably every day. More andmore companies and organizations offer their products over the Internetand offer fewer customer attendants on site. Further the commercialtransactions are ever more complicated, with customer loyalty cards,credit cards, and ID cards all being swiped for one purchase of e.g. asandwich.

On the other hand end customers move more and more each day. A typicalsales representative in the EU might be in 5 different countries duringa working week. With more mobile customers, and ever reduced investmentto serve said customers there is a clear long felt need to developtechnologies that would allow the customers to automatically access theservices and products of companies or organisations, easily, right atthe moment, right at the location, with minimum cost.

To address this need several mobile cellular techniques have beendevised to purchase a product for consumption on site, without thecustomer addressing the service attendant. Perhaps one of the mostsuccessful practical technologies is the one developed in HelsinkiFinland by Plusdial Oy for accessing public transport tickets. Nearlyevery tram in Helsinki has a mobile phone number on the wall of thetram, to which the customers can SMS a coded message, and one standardadult ticket will be sent by return SMS with the fee deducted from thephone bill. This system suffers from a major disadvantage in that peopleneed to find and read the instructions from the wall, and the system canissue only one type of ticket: standard one way ticket.

It is also known from WO 2009/022356 that SMS based forms can be used bykey value pairs. This document is cited here as reference. This textbased method requires a lot of typing from the users within a formlimited to 160 characters.

It is also known from publication WO 02/39765 of the inventor, hownon-intrusive advertisements or messages could be shown to mobile phoneusers on the display, for example based on location as the user entersor leaves a cell of the cellular network. This document is cited here asreference. The disadvantage associated with this document is that thefact that the message does not intrude does not mean that the user needsor is interested in the message at all, and it is even less probablethat the user is interested in the message at the moment and place ofreceiving the message.

It is also within the prior art to purchase goods by filling a form onthe Internet while accessing it with a mobile phone, which allows formore complex transactions.

It is also known that search engines and any electronic informationretrieval (IR) device operate by indexing. Indexing is the process bywhich a vocabulary of keywords is assigned to all documents of a corpus(=body of documents, such as the Internet or US congress library).Mathematically, an index is a relation mapping each document to the setof keywords that it is about:

The inverse mapping captures, for each keyword, the documents itdescribes:

The index relation is the fundamental connection between the user'sexpressions of information need and the documents that can satisfy them,this simply stated goal—“Build the Index relation”—is at the core of theIR problem and Finding Out About (FOA) generally, [Finding Out About,Richard Belew, cited and quoted here as reference].

These days search engines use web crawler software to pinpoint andpickup keywords from web pages and build the index relation. In doingso, web crawler indexing software will choose rare and relevant words tobuild the index relation. The fact that “and” is on a webpage is notreally interesting because it does not limit the search, whereas“hypothermia” is a very rare word in the world wide web, and wouldprobably be chosen as a keyword. Thus, a prior art search engine willsearch all keywords, but it will ignore words such as “and”, “to” andmany isolated alphanumeric characters such as “10” or “10-7 pm”, becausethey are extremely frequent in the billions of web pages and essentiallydo not limit the search at all.

It is also known that Google mobile search and Google Maps for mobilededuces the location of the mobile phone from GPS data, WLAN-based/WIFIbased services and Cell transmitter based services in this order ofprecedence (source: Google Maps-Wikipedia). The location is taken intoaccount so that the user does not need to type his location in Googlemobile search. Google Mobile also provides for automatic updating of thebackground location.

The problem faced by the prior art on the search side is that whilelocation related human language identifiers are unique enough to bepicked up as identifiers, such as the address “Fabianinkatu, Helsinki,Finland”, many time-space related information, like the co-ordinates(longitude, latitude):

24.949586391448974,60.16525494433567

Or “open weekdays 9 am-5 pm”, are not indexed at all, or not quoted byweb page owners on their sites.

Consequently when you try to search for a barber that would be open withavailable reservations as you are walking home from work, on the spotwithin your current postcode, right now, you end up having to searchseveral web pages in advance that might be good candidates for providingthe barber service, and manually inspecting whether they are actuallyopen/closed/available/not available and so on. Walking on the streetwhile staring at the mobile phone screen for search results could getthe user driven over by a car, in addition to being distracting andunpleasant to consumers. Mobile Data Roaming is also very expensive inmany countries.

Quite clearly what is needed is a dynamically and contextually awareautomatic mechanism on the query side while having a dynamically andcontextually aware search engine on the reply side to assist the user inpassively browsing the information space as he changes location and timegoes by, and providing the relevant results thereto, which can be thennoticed and re-acted to with minimum effort. This should also be lowcost, and not use cellular roaming connections if cheaper ones areavailable. The invention solves just this problem.

SUMMARY

The invention under study is directed towards a system and a method foreffectively finding and accessing the electronic point of distributionof a good or service with a mobile station as the user intends to use,retrieve or purchase the service. For a walking consumer with a mobilephone, the consumer is browsing the web pages by his movement inspace-time and his context, hence the title of the application.

A further object of the invention is to present a system and a methodwhere some or all of the interactions at the electronic point ofdistribution are automated by the mobile station.

One aspect of the invention involves a mobile phone that is used by auser. The location of the user is discovered from a GPSreceiver/transceiver in the mobile phone, or by the cell in the cellularnetwork or by triangulation or other location determining methods. Thislocation information is translated to at least one street address(es)for example by searching the information against a database of addressesin the mobile phone or over the network on a network server. Theaddresses are then used further as search terms to search over theInternet. Quite clearly, as the person walks for example on the streetcalled “Fabianinkatu” in 00130 Helsinki, the web pages of companies atthis address start popping out automatically as search results, as themobile phone browses the Internet as the user moves on this street.Alternatively or in addition to posting information on the Internet, thecompanies can send information pages via Bluetooth and/or WLAN or otherlocal short range information link in accordance with the invention.

If the user now types in “Hotel” into a search engine query field in hismobile phone, the mobile Internet and/or file system browser softwareand/or search engine software of the invention will realise that theuser is searching for a hotel. Consequently, the search engine will rankand the browser will display for example the room reservation pages ofhotels on Fabianinkatu ahead of other web pages. Further, if theDesktop/browser history of the user contains mainly confirmation emailswith hotel rates of 100 Euros, the web pages of hotels with these ratesare ranked ahead of others. Alternatively if there is a payday receiptshowing mid-to-high income in the inbox or the file system, the searchengine can use mathematical methods to deduce that e.g. 3-4 star hotelsare the most relevant accommodation options for this user. After asearch result is discovered that achieves or exceeds a certain relevancelevel, an alert is signalled from the mobile station, by sound,vibration, and/or light emission. This way the user will notice thehotel room opportunity as he is walking close by with the mobile stationin his pocket.

When the user decides to access the reservation page and decides to booka hotel room, the browser/mobile phone software will automatically fillin the entries on the electronic reservation form, such as name, birthdate, credit card number, customer loyalty card number and the like. Theaforementioned data can be retrieved from the mobile phone memory, andonly minimal information is required by the user to fill into entryfields with the keyboard. For example, in one embodiment only thesecurity code of the card is requested to be entered manually. The usercan now book the room in 20 seconds or so, a couple of blocks away fromthe hotel, without visiting the hotel, or without searching maps andhotels over the Internet. If the user has a business meeting or aconference at the postcode 00130, and needs a room for the night nearby,he can use the invention to avoid queues in receptions or the studyingof maps and markets on traditional sites such as Hotels.com® or thelike. To facilitate this service the mobile phone is typically connectedto the Internet. However, it is possible in some embodiments that thehotels would send their electronic information via a Bluetooth or likelocal connection, and the inventive system would be arranged to searchdata available via said local connection in addition to or asreplacement of the Internet.

After the booking has been made, the inventive mobile phone browsersoftware prints the reservation confirmation or receipt for example as aPDF document to a file and/or on paper. This document could beautomatically placed into a “receipts” folder, for later bookkeeping, orsent directly to an email address, IP-address, ftp address or otherelectronic address for bookkeeping. For example the PDF document of thehotel receipt could be sent to an invoice processing email of thecompany the user works for, and an enterprise resource management (ERM)software could automatically book the hotel fee as a business expense.From the PDF document the ERM software recognises for example the VAT(Value Added Tax) and total sum and other bill related financialparameters by searching and retrieving them to memory and/or scanningthem for search and retrieval by e.g. “OCR” (Object CharacterRecognition), if the relevant items are not in text format, but ratherin image format. Thus the user would not need to store a paper receiptto his pocket in accordance with the invention, and considerableadministrative overhead is reduced.

So, for example in the case of a traveller without a hotel room inHelsinki, the user could set his mobile station to browse hotel roomdeals as he walks on the streets of Helsinki. The query parameters areautomatically updated as the user moves in space-time and hence thesearch results are updated on the mobile phone screen as the user walksthe streets and time goes by. In some embodiments the search results arenot shown on the screen. It is useful to turn the screen off, andcontinue searching in accordance with the invention. In someembodiments, if there is a very good match to the search parameters avoice, sound, vibration and/or light signal is provided as an alarm tothe user from the mobile station, signalling that he should look at theopportunity on the mobile station screen and/or the physical proximitymore closely, and the screen is arranged to be lit up when this happensand/or in response to user action to said signal. This is typicallyconducted so that once a certain relevance level is exceeded by a searchresult the mobile phone software instructs the loudspeaker, vibratorand/or light to produce a certain signal. In one embodiment the mobilephone may ring and/or play a ringtone to signal a highly relevant searchresult. In one embodiment the mobile station vibrates the battery orscreen and/or flashes a LED light and/or screen when a relevance levelis exceeded. In some embodiments the user can set the threshold level ofrelevance for signal activation from his mobile station manually, but inother embodiments the search engine, mobile station, and/or a networkserver computer can set the threshold level of relevance or suggestsuitable threshold levels to the user in accordance with the invention.

The invention makes possible a whole new phenomenon of human behaviourthat has multiple advantages. The inventor has named the activity“walkbrowsing” or “browwalking”. Of course the person is not walking onhis eye brows, but rather he is passively or actively surfing theinformation space (e.g. Internet and local information networks) withhis path in space-time as the dynamic search parameter. The user doesnot need to look at the screen of the mobile phone as he browses bywalking. When something relevant is discovered by the search, hereceives an alarm signal from the mobile station disclosing that aninteresting search result is in the physical proximity.

Suppose a user is roaming the streets of London say on Piccadilly at 2pm, with an airline e-ticket in the Inbox of the email software withflight details of the flight departing the same day 5 hours later at 7pm on Sunday. Quite clearly, the inventive software will only be lookingfor activities that start and end in a time space of 2-3 hours inreasonable proximity to the area surrounding Piccadilly. The user types“museum” into the mobile station as input to a search engine. The searchengine returns a webpage of the Royal Academy of Arts, which shows thatthere is an Exhibition titled “Glasgow Boys”; the museum is open, andjust around the corner. This activity interests the user, he clicks on“tickets” on the webpage and the electronic purchase form is auto-filledby the mobile phone software of the invention. Consequently, the userclicks accept purchase, the mobile phone software retrieves the receiptelectronically, and the user walks past the ticket queues into theexhibition, and shows the receipt if the ticket is controlled.

What happens in the network side of the inventive software system?Naturally the web pages need to be “crawled” by a search engine indexingsoftware, commonly referred to as “web crawler”. A web crawler typicallyanalyzes a corpus of documents. For example the web crawlers of searchengines like Google or Yahoo are “crawling” the entire public Internetand thereby arranging documents. For many of the known aspects ofInformation Retrieval, the reader is referred to the book “Finding OutAbout”, by Richard K. Belew, which document is cited here as reference.

In one aspect of the invention, the prior art search engine isinventively improved to accommodate “browwalking”. The inventive webcrawler or information page crawler of the inventive search enginecrawls for keywords in the usual way, but also for space-time accessrelevant information, such as location, opening hours at that locationand/or price information at that location. The information extracted byand available in the inventive search engine is thus moremultidimensional than in prior art search engines. In the extractiondata OCR can be used to retrieve textual data in image format.

Now as the inventive mobile phone software receives a query: “museum”from the user, it can ask the search engine a coded query along thelines: “What museum associated activities are available for amid-to-high income individual walking on Piccadilly in London UK on thisSunday afternoon now with a flight to catch in five hours?” Of course,this query is much more specific than the user typed query, and thematches to this query can be expected to be more relevant. In fact, manypeople would not realise to ask a search query from a search engine inthis detail. By providing the relevant contextual parameters andtranslating them into query terms, the invention makes it easier for theuser to know what to know & ask when he is on the move with his mobilestation.

Even more importantly the inventive search engine provides searchresults based on consensual relevance at a certain location and/or time.The inventive search engine can store click through rates for websitesas a function of the user's query location. If it turns out that, saymore than 20%, of people searching and querying for a museum aroundPiccadilly London indeed click onto the Royal Academy of Arts, theirwebpage's relevance weight will be increased, as is very likely that thenext person querying “museum” at Piccadilly is also trying to find theRoyal Academy of Arts.

The invention thus has the revolutionary and pioneering advantage ofallowing people to scan opportunities in the information space as theytraverse through space-time in their own context. The inventionfacilitates on-demand effortless Mobile Internet Search that allows theusers to browse passively or actively and access opportunities that theydid not know about, or would not have had time to find out about withminimum effort as the software of the mobile phone is scanning theInternet and information pages for these opportunities and displayingthe results dynamically on the mobile phone screen, or alerting aboutrelevant results instead of displaying them all the time.

From the service provider perspective the invention provides equallyrevolutionary advantages. For example, if there is a cancellation at saya barber on the same day, the barber shop can possibly quickly acquirenew customers by updating the reservation information and making itavailable over the Internet and/or a short range communication link, byallowing users that are passively looking for the service and happen tobe in the neighbourhood to find the offered hair cutting service withtheir mobile stations. Quite clearly this is a far more effective wayfor businesses to find customers than emailing discount vouchers to halfa million people at a time, and paying a lot of money for emails nobodyreads and everybody hates, or purchasing conventional location based weblinks on Google. It is remarkably convenient to just take a haircut orpurchase a burgundy silk tie on the way home spontaneously, but nobodyis willing to pop into every barber to ask whether they are available,or go through tie racks of every shop, only to discover that burgundyties have been sold out.

A mobile search method is in accordance with the invention and comprisesat least one mobile station with a communication network connection, andthe mobile station location is determined, and said mobile stationconnects and/or is connected to at least one communication network andis characterised by the steps of:

-   -   said location is searched against street addresses from at least        one database and/or search engine on the mobile station and/or        in the network, and at least one matching street address is        computed and/or retrieved,    -   said at least one street address is inputted as a query term        into at least one search engine on the mobile station and/or in        the network,    -   said at least one search engine conducts at least one search in        at least one said mobile station file system and/or the Internet        and/or a file system in the network with said at least one query        term,    -   at least one search result is displayed to user on the screen of        the mobile station.

A mobile station, arranged to determine its location, and arranged toconnect to a communication network is in accordance with the inventionand characterised in that,

-   -   the said determined location is arranged to be searched against        street addresses from at least one database and/or search engine        on the mobile station and/or in the network, and at least one        matching street address is arranged to be computed and/or        retrieved,    -   said at least one street address is arranged to be inputted as a        query term into at least one search engine on the mobile station        and/or in the network,    -   said at least one search engine is arranged to conduct at least        one search in at least one said mobile station file system        and/or the Internet and/or a file system in the network with        said at least one query term,    -   at least one search result is arranged to be displayed to user        on the screen of the mobile station.

A network server arranged to receive location data from at least onemobile station and/or determine location of said mobile station is inaccordance with the invention and characterised in that,

-   -   said location data is searched against street addresses from at        least one database and/or search engine on the mobile station        and/or in the network, and at least one matching street address        is arranged to be computed and/or retrieved,    -   said at least one street address is arranged to be inputted as a        query term into at least one search engine on the mobile station        and/or in the network,    -   said at least one search engine is arranged to conduct at least        one search in at least one said mobile station file system        and/or the Internet and/or a file system in the network with        said at least one query term,    -   at least one search result is arranged to be displayed to the        user on the screen of the mobile station.

A software program product arranged to determine the location of atleast one mobile station is in accordance with the invention andcharacterised in that,

-   -   said location is arranged to be searched against street        addresses from at least one database and/or search engine, and        at least one matching street address is computed and/or        retrieved,    -   said at least one street address is inputted as a query term        into at least one search engine,    -   said at least one search engine is arranged to conduct at least        one search in at least one said mobile station file system        and/or the Internet and/or a file system over a network with        said at least one query term,    -   at least one search result is arranged to be displayed to user        on a screen of a mobile station.

In the above inventions of four preceding paragraphs the click-throughrate from the user location is stored for at least one search result.This can be used in the ranking of the search results in the future. Itis in accordance with the invention to rank web sites with highclick-through rates from a specific location as relevant at thatlocation. Similarly click through rates may be stored as a function oftime of the query in accordance with the invention. Similarly clickthrough rates may be stored as a function of time of the query andlocation in accordance with the invention. These inventions greatlyimprove the accuracy of location based search. As the relevance scalebecome more meaningful by the consensual relevance weights deduced fromclick through rates, the inventive mobile station alert signals when arelevance level has been achieved or exceeded for a search result becomemore and more useful in everyday life.

A search engine with an index relation is in accordance with theinvention and is characterised in that, the index is time and/orlocation sensitive to at least one incoming query.

A search engine with an index relation is in accordance with theinvention and characterised in that the index is arranged to calculate anumerical weight to the association between at least one time and/oruser location of an incoming query and at least one document.

An electronic transaction method is in accordance with the invention andcharacterised in that,

-   -   at least one computer sends a short range information page        signal,    -   at least one mobile station in range receives said signal,    -   at least one said mobile station software and/or said computer        software searches said information pages with at least one query        term,    -   at least one search result is shown on the display of the mobile        station.

A mobile station in accordance with the invention is characterised inthat,

-   -   at least one computer is arranged to send a short range        information page signal to said mobile station,    -   the said mobile station in range is arranged to receive said        information page signal,    -   at least one mobile station software and/or said computer        software is arranged to search said information pages with at        least one query term,    -   at least one search result is arranged to be shown on the        display of the mobile station.

A network server in accordance with the invention is characterised inthat,

-   -   the network server is arranged to send a short range information        page signal to said mobile station,    -   the said mobile station in range is arranged to receive said        information page signal and form a duplex connection,    -   at least one mobile station software and/or network server is        arranged to search said information pages with at least one        query term,    -   at least one search result is arranged to be shown on the        display of the mobile station.

A “duplex” connection means that information can flow in bothdirections, e.g. from mobile station to server and vice versa. Albeitsome security restrictions could be implemented to control the flow ofsensitive information via the short range connections in accordance withthe invention.

A software program product in accordance with the invention ischaracterised in that,

-   -   at least one information page signal is arranged to be sent by a        computer and a short range communication link,    -   at least one mobile station in said range is arranged to receive        said signal,    -   said software program product searches said information pages        with at least one query term received from said mobile station,    -   at least one search result is arranged to be shown on the        display of the mobile station.

In addition and with reference to the aforementioned advantage accruingembodiments, the best mode of the invention is considered to be clientsoftware on a mobile phone or other mobile station that can connect to asearch engine over a network and dynamically search the Internet withuser specified query terms and the space-time position of the mobilephone and signal an alert when the user is physically/geographicallyclose to a relevant search result. Further in the best mode the mobileclient software can search information pages displayed via a short rangeconnection, such as WLAN or Bluetooth independently. Even further in thebest mode search results with high location specific click-through ratesare given high relevance weights for queries that take place in thelocation with the high click-through rate. The best mode of theinvention is therefore a mobile search client and a search engine thatmatches, alerts and shows on the mobile phone screen the users to theclosest documents in consensual relevance and space-time when relevanceto the query exceeds a threshold limit, for both documents that are onthe Internet and documents that are being sent by local computers viashort range communication links to the mobile station for review.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

In the following the invention will be described in greater detail withreference to exemplary embodiments in accordance with the accompanyingdrawings, in which

FIG. 1 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment of the inventive browsingmethod 10 as a flow diagram.

FIG. 2 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 20 of the inventive browsingmethod implemented with short range communication links in accordancewith the invention.

FIG. 3 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 30 of the inventive mobilestation when the invention is in use.

FIG. 4 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 40 of the inventive mobilestation when at least one short range communication link of theinvention is in use.

FIG. 5 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 50 of the inventivecommunication system as a block diagram.

FIG. 6 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 60 of the inventivecommunication system when at least one short range communication link ofthe invention is in use, and as a block diagram.

FIG. 7 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 70 of the inventiveprocessing method used with the electronic page selected with theinventive browsing method as a flow diagram.

FIG. 8 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 80 of the inventiveprocessing method used with the electronic page selected with theinventive browsing method as a block and flow diagram from theperspective of the user.

FIG. 9 shows an exemplary embodiment 90 of an index relation inaccordance with the invention as a matrix.

FIG. 10 shows an exemplary embodiment 91 of the invention as a networkdiagram that displays logical connections of search.

Some of the embodiments are described in the dependent claims.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF EMBODIMENTS

FIG. 1 demonstrates an embodiment of the inventive browsing method 10.In phase 100 the mobile station determines its location, or its locationis determined by the network or third party. In the first case, themobile station has a GPS receiver and/or transceiver that can determineits location. In the other alternative, if the mobile station is acellular phone the location is determined from the cell identity themobile phone is currently in, or by triangulation between base stations.In some embodiments sufficient location information is available in anetwork register, such as a Home Location Register (HLR), and thelocation of the mobile station can be read directly by a computer or themobile station from there. Other techniques for determining the locationcould also be used in some embodiments of the invention, or theaforementioned methods could be used together in combination inaccordance with the invention.

In phase 110 the said location information is compared to streetaddresses or other natural language location identifiers, like names oftrain stations or airports, e.g. Heathrow Airport, gives a location in anatural language (west of London, UK) even though it may not be astreet. The location information is typically converted to naturallanguage addresses by searching using the location co-ordinates as aquery for matching natural language addresses in a database or group ofdatabases and/or over a network of computers and/or with a searchengine. The database or group of databases and/or network of computerscan be for example any server with Geographical Information Systems(GIS) software installed on it in some embodiments. For example The U.S.Board of Geographic Names (BGS) and the earlier Federal InformationProcessing Standards (FIPS) provide place information in the US, andcould provide such data, as well as other commercial and/or public placeinformation providers in the US, EU and elsewhere. Typically there maybe more than one matching street address in some embodiments.

In phase 120 at least one street address or natural language locationidentifier is inputted as a search term into a search engine on themobile station and/or on a network computer. In some embodiments thecoordinate→natural language address conversion is done at the searchengine. In this embodiment the mobile station software client could onlybe feeding longitude and latitude coordinates into the search engine inaccordance with the invention. In some embodiments the location of themobile station is deduced by the search engine solely from networkparameters without involving the mobile station. Preferably all thephases 100-110-120 are implemented automatically and as fast as possiblewithout user input, but in some embodiments the user can add and/ordelete one or more search terms or modify existing ones in phase 120,and/or the current time could be added as a search term. In someembodiments additional search terms are derived from the metadata and/orcontextual information on the mobile station. For example keywordfrequency in email inbox and/or desktop files could be used to definecontextual search terms and/or ranking terms in some embodiments.

In the case of more than one street address, multiple parallel searchqueries for each street address and possible additional data asexplained before can be formulated to a set of queries in accordancewith the invention.

In phase 130 the said search engine searches with the search query thefile system of the mobile station and/or at least one network computerand/or the Internet. In case of multiple queries the search engineexecutes the various query alternatives in series and/or parallel. Inthe case of multiple queries and results for each, in some embodimentsthe search results are aggregated to one result list in accordance withthe invention. In some embodiments of the invention the search engine isjust a conventional search engine Internet site or its applicationinterface such as Google, Yahoo or the like. It is a known fact that theinterior workings of these search engines are quite well kept tradesecrets of their respective companies, and an independent developercannot necessarily replicate Google based on instructions in the publicdomain. However, it is possible to use Google, Yahoo or other commonsearch engines in accordance with the invention based on a “black box”approach. As the query sets or at least one query have been devised asdescribed in the earlier phases, these queries can be automatically fedinto Google or Yahoo with inputting software. This inputting softwarecan for example emulate keyboard presses at the Google prompt when theGoogle input query line is active and feed the queries and collectsearch results into its memory for each or some of the executed queries.A computer script is then implemented to read the relevance scores, andwhen a certain threshold is exceeded a mobile client application isarranged to use the relevant mobile phone operating system/and/ormanufacturer API (Application Programmer Interface) to initiate a sound,light and/or vibration signal with the mobile station.

Some search engines may cater for outside developers and it is inaccordance with the invention to realise the mobile station softwarewith a search engine application interface. For example Google Apps, theapplication interface of the search engine Google could be used to inputthe queries into the Google search engine automatically in someembodiments. The search engine on at least one network computer can beaccessed in the network, over the network, across the network, or by anyother conceivable access mechanism in accordance with the invention insome embodiments.

Alternatively, it is possible to build a dedicated search engine. Itshould comprise a web crawler such as any of the following: LibWWW Robotof the W3C Consortium, Perl based crawler interface by Gisle Aas,Parallel UserAgent by Marc Langheinrich, and/or the Visual Web Spider byNewprosoft.com. The web crawler is set to crawl web pages to compose theIndex relation. The mobile station software is directed to send theirsearch queries to a network computer with access to said Index relation,which is arranged to receive them. In a simple basic embodiment, itwould be possible to require perfect matches to all keywords, and justrank these documents in the order of when these documents were lastupdated, i.e. to offer the latest complete hit or match to queryparameters first. This type of an index is usually referred to as binaryindex. The queries produced by the inventive mobile station and/orsearch engine are typically more accurate and situation specific thanthe queries on average prior art engines. The relevant answers to thesearch queries are therefore much clearer, and especially when theinventive click-through rates at a certain location are stored by themobile station and/or search engine to deduce consensual relevanceweights, the most relevant search results will be clearer further still.

Of course the search engine could be independently implemented with morecomplex weighting and matching schemes. We are essentially measuringaboutness between the query and the documents, and a more sophisticatedway of doing this is to use real value weights to describe the strengthof the association between a document and a query, instead of the binary(0/1) (No/Yes) method. In some embodiments the real value weight w_(kd)is proportional to number of occurrences of keyword k in document dnoted here as f_(kd). There are various alternatives to implementing thereal value weights, but in one embodiment the inverse document frequency(IDF) approach is chosen with the Robertson & Sparck Jones weighting (Eq3.22 Belew 2008):

w _(kd) =f _(kd)*(log [((NDoc−D _(k))+0.5)/(D _(k)+0.5)])

where, NDoc is the number of documents and D_(k) the number of documentswith the keyword k. Also the more complex OKAPI weights of equation 3.30from Belew 2008 could be used in accordance with the invention in someembodiments.

These real value weights can be placed in the matrix from w₁₁ to w_(nn),shown in FIG. 9 index matrix in some embodiments. We can take the innerproduct of the query and document vectors as our metric:

Sim(q,d)=q·d

We define query q and all documents d to be vectors in a space ofdimensionality equal to Nkw, the keyword vocabulary size. The documentsthat are the best match to the query are simply the ones that are mostsimilar relative to metric Sim measuring distance between points in thespace.

Further details to implement the basic information retrieval device forthe search engine from first principles can be found from Chapters 3-5of Finding Out About, Belew, 2008. The same reference also disclosesadditional mathematical techniques for the basic search engine such asMinkowski Metric (equation 5.9, could be used with the aforementionedvector space), singular value decomposition (SVD), the OKAPI retrievalsystem and the like, which could also be used as needed in accordancewith the invention. Keyword discrimination and vector lengthnormalization could also be used in accordance with the inventionsimilarly as explained in Belew 2008.

In one embodiment the search engine over the Internet maintains andstores a record of which documents such as web pages are accessed fromwhich geographic location the most and/or which web pages have beenaccessed from which geographic location with what query the most. Mobileusers will probably not be searching for background literature for theirPhD's with the walkbrowsing system of the invention. Instead, they wantthe very basic info and access ordering logistics when they are on themove: for example more than half of the users of the invention typing“train to London” at the Heathrow terminals could be expected to besearching for Heathrow Express, or Heathrow Connect, or Piccadilly linefrom the Tube. If this is evidenced by actual typed keywords and actualtraffic to those web sites, the web pages of these train services can bearranged to receive very high consensual relevance weights for queriesfrom that location in accordance with the invention in some embodiments.So if Heathrow express website has a high click-through rate (usersproceed from the search result frequently to the actual web page),Heathrow express as a search result is likely to have a high relevancescore in accordance with the invention. Because people are typicallylooking for very similar things in the same places the consensualrelevance weights and the observation of click-through rates from alocation is likely to increase search engine performance and reduceprocessing power and bandwidth requirements for search as the resultsare more relevant. The click-through rate is understood as the fractionof users at that location, when being shown the search result, click onthe search result to view said search result or retrieve furtherinformation from the search result.

Click-through rates to deduce the consensual relevance of search resultscan be collected stored and used in at least three ways different ways:

-   -   1) consensual relevance weights as a function of location:        click-through rates of search results with the user at a certain        location,    -   2) consensual relevance weights as a function of location and        time: click-through rates of search results with the user at a        certain location within a certain time range,    -   3) consensual relevance weights as a function of location and        time and user query: click-through rates of search results with        the user at a certain location within a certain time range        asking a certain query, e.g “train?”.        -   Quite clearly any permutation and/or combination of the            above three alternatives is also in accordance with the            invention.

In one embodiment of the invention the searching and contextualrelevance ranking method outlined in EP09168388.8 and PCT/EP2010/061611of the same patent family of the inventor could be used, which areincorporated into this application as one of the searching and rankingalternatives to be implemented on the search engine-server side. Thesedocuments are also included as references. In phase 140 the mobilestation displays at least one search result on screen to user. Phase 140is optional, and not all result to the updated searches need to beshown. When the user is “walkbrowsing” with the mobile station in thepocket, the display consumes power unnecessarily if it is on in thepocket when the user is not looking at it. Typically the most relevantdocuments are ranked first in some embodiments.

As the location changes by the mobile station moving, or time changes asit goes by, the aforementioned searches are conducted again with updatedparameters and the search results on the screen of the mobile stationare refreshed. The constant automatic updating of the parameters andrefreshed search results allows the user to browse the Internet with hismotion through space time as one search parameter, and discover newthings about the current environmental surroundings with minimaladministrative effort in phase 150. Time of the query can beautomatically included as a query term in some embodiments. The time ofthe query can be the current time, the point in time when the query issent or received, and/or a time mentioned in the query, like “Table for7 pm?”, being the query, 7 pm, is the time of query in some embodimentsof the invention. Time of query can be used as a query term inalphanumeric format, numerical format or alphabetic format in accordancewith the invention in some embodiments. Similarly location of the querycan be the current location of user and/or mobile station and/or alocation mentioned in the query.

Thus, in the morning the user can just enter search terms into hismobile phone, put the phone in the pocket and wait for beeps or othersignals identifying a match nearby. The search terms may involvecommercial products, but also any other words, even people's names. Insome embodiments the inventive mobile search client is configured tosignal when the search retrieves e.g. a social network page of a friendthat is geographically close. For example, user enters “Tom” as queryterm, Tom updates his status “I am on Fabianinkatu” to a social networkpage, the user gets to fabianinkatu or close by and “fabianinkatu” isused as a search term with “Tom”. Consequently Tom's social network pageis retrieved as a search result and the user is signaled and Tom and theuser can meet spontaneously on fabianinkatu or nearby in accordance withthe invention.

It should be noted that with the combination of user specified queryterms and location terms several permutations of the invention arepossible. In one embodiment the location terms are used to retrieve thedocuments and the user specified term is used to search and/or rankdocuments within this group of documents. In some embodiments the userspecified query term is used to retrieve the documents and the locationterms are used to search and/or rank documents within this group ofdocuments. In some embodiments the combination of location terms anduser specified terms is used as an integral query with multiple terms.The use of location terms to retrieve documents has the advantage thatno user action is required. The use of user specified term first is moreeconomical, as location terms are used to search from a considerablysmaller collection of documents. This is likely to be an importantconsideration as data roaming charges are quite considerable andprocessing power is a scarce resource.

In order to save roaming data transfer resources and processing power,the system can be optimized. In one embodiment a first broader query isconducted for example as: pullover (user generated) London (computergenerated). The inventive system then searches just the retrieveddocuments from this collection with more exact query terms as they aredetermined, e.g. W8, a London postcode.

The same network computer or network of computers can execute all orsome of the phases 100, 110, 120, 130, 140 of the inventive method insome embodiments. In some embodiments different phases are executed bydifferent network computers or networks of computers in accordance withthe invention. Focusing many phases in the same network computer ornetwork of computers allows for faster processing.

Quite clearly this continuous passive searching generates a lot oftraffic in the cellular network and the Internet, but the frequency ofthe updating could be controlled by providing some control limits inaccordance with the invention.

It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the method 10can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 20, 30, 40, 50, 60,70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

FIG. 2 demonstrates an embodiment 20 of the inventive browsing methodimplemented with short range communication links. In phase 200 at leastone computer sends a short range information page signal. In someembodiments this signal is sent via Bluetooth or WLAN connection, whichis local, i.e. range a maximum of a few hundred meters. The short rangedirect connection is a special case in the unified inventive concept,because the type of the connection itself reveals proximity without theneed to use other location based parameters in the search terms. Inphase 210 at least one mobile station receives the said information pagesignal. The information page signal is typically similar to any Internetpage, but it is instead of the Internet sent directly via a short rangedata connection. In fact in some embodiments of the invention someparties may simply just keep broadcasting their web pages also via theshort range connections, such as WLAN or Bluetooth. This requiresminimal changes to existing systems. A WLAN base station that would havea transmit URL or—webpage would be sufficient in some embodiments. Theowner of the WLAN link, say a cafe, would simply put the URL of its ownweb pages as the transmit URL. When a user enters a query term“espresso” into his mobile phone receiving the said signal, the mobilestation software searches in phase 220 with the search term “espresso”the information pages of the aforementioned cafe, which are web pages inthis case. Of course the mobile station software may search otherincoming information pages, or may browse the Internet as outlined inembodiment 10 with the user specified term “espresso”, and/or locationdata deduced in embodiment 10.

In phase 230 at least one search result is displayed to the user on thescreen of the mobile phone. With a high likelihood the information pageof the cafe with espresso on it, such as the “menu” page will rank quitehigh in the search results. In phase 240 the user accesses the saidinformation page, where espressos can be ordered and in some embodimentsalso paid. In one embodiment the information page is an online orderform, which is auto-filled by the mobile station software, for exampleproviding any of the following: name, address, email address, phonenumber, username, password, credit card details, bank details, internetbank access codes, customer loyalty card data and/or the like. One ormore entry fields may be auto-filled in accordance with the invention.By accepting and sending the online order the user can pay the producte.g. espresso electronically from 50 metres away and proceed to collecthis coffee from the Barista by showing the receipt on the mobile phonescreen. In some embodiments, the account details needed to process theelectronic transaction are stored in the mobile station memory and/or anetwork computer memory, but on final approval the user is requested toenter a PIN number, similarly to purchasing with bank- and/or creditcards that have electronic chips. In some embodiments of the inventionthe banking details could be stored in the SIM card chip inside themobile phone, similarly to the chip in the bank card. In other versions,such as the “software SIM”, the banking details would be stored in themobile station, network server or both.

In some embodiments any purchases are simply billed on the phone bill ofthe mobile station and/or network subscription being used. In thisembodiment a useful optional alternative is to use the telephone numberfor user identification.

It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the method 20can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 30, 40, 50, 60,70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

FIG. 3 demonstrates an embodiment 30 of the inventive mobile stationwhen the invention is in use. The user is on Fabianinkatu in HelsinkiFinland at Decimal coordinates (longitude, latitude):

24.949586391448974,60.16525494433567

In this embodiment these coordinates have been deduced by GPS, but assaid triangulation, cell identity, and other cellular based locationdetermination methods could be used as well, but they will probablyreturn less decimal places, i.e. provide less accuracy. The length of anarc degree of north-south latitude difference Δφ, is about 60 nauticalmiles, 111 kilometres or 69 statute miles at any latitude. So the 6^(th)decimal place corresponds to roughly one meter, and the GPS has roughly10 cm intrinsic error, so;

24.9495864,60.1652549would be the position in relevant significant figures. This positiontranslates to being on Fabianinkatu as shown in block 320 on the screen.When the natural language address parameters with this position areinputted into a search engine with the user specified query term“Hotel”, search results listed in screen block 340 are shown on themobile station screen. The full query in this case might be for example:

“Hotel” (user generated), fabianinkatu (computer generated), 00130(computer generated), Helsinki (computer generated).

Parentheses signify the origin of the query parameter. This query can besynonym expanded into multiple queries in accordance with the invention.The Boolean operators and, or, not, either/or, or other logicaloperators, can also be changed between the query terms automaticallyand/or manually to modify the query and/or to expand the query todifferent alternatives in accordance with the invention such as:

“Hotel” (user generated) AND fabianinkatu (computer generated) AND 00130(computer generated) OR Helsinki (computer generated),and“Hotel” (user generated) OR fabianinkatu (computer generated) AND 00130(computer generated) OR Helsinki (computer generated).

In one embodiment the user could just select any webpage from the hitlist 340 by the usual way, pointing and clicking with the mouse, fingeror any other user interface command used by the mobile station. In amore developed embodiment the contents of the mobile station and/or pastbrowsing behaviour could be used to define a context for the user. Forexample if the user's inbox has confirmation emails and messages withhotel reservations costing about 100-150 Euros/night, and/or there is noreservation for tonight anywhere in the file system or email software ofthe mobile station, the mobile browser software will in some embodimentsautomatically navigate to the reservation page of Fabian Hotel onFabianinkatu, and show the reservation page where an available room fortonight can be booked within the price range. If the user accepts thischoice by pressing an icon or the like, the auto-filled payment and/orreservation form appears and the user can book the room by for exampleany of the following alternatives: clicking on an icon with a pointer,pressing a button, entering a number, such as a PIN number or CVCsecurity code number on the back of a credit and/or debit card. Thepreferred webpage could also be ranked first in the hit list 340 in someembodiments. With the invention a suitable hotel room is found andbooked within 20 seconds and ideally with only a couple of key pressesin response to the confirmations asked by the software of the mobilestation, which is typically the mobile Internet Browser.

In some embodiments of the invention the screen view 310 with thedecimal co-ordinates is hidden from the user, and in some embodimentsalso the map 320 is not displayed. In some embodiments the user canaccess these via a menu. In a preferred embodiment the screen blocks 340and 350 alternate on the screen or are both shown on the screen of themobile station 300. As the user and the mobile station move and timegoes by the search query is updated, the search is repeated with updatedparameters and the hit list 340 is updated, the ranking is updatedand/or a new first choice is updated. These updated screen blocks 340,350 are then shown on the mobile station screen. In some embodimentsfive best matches or any number of best matches is displayed on themobile station screen at some intervals so the user can passively viewthe searched choices available to him. In some embodiments the resultsare not shown on the screen, for example to save power by keeping thescreen off. New updates to the search parameters and new searches basedon said parameters and alerts based on search results that achieverelevance levels above a certain threshold can still be executed whenthese activities or some of them are not displayed on the screen of themobile station in accordance with the invention.

In fact a multitude of display schemes can be implemented in accordancewith the invention to suit individual tastes and mobile station designs.The main thing about the invention is that the user can arrange themobile station to actively browse opportunities relevant to hisspace-time position, space-time trajectory, parameters and/or context;so that he can passively view and/or record the opportunities availablein the information space and react to those that he chooses to react towith minimal administrative effort. If the user turned on the inventivewalkbrowsing option in the morning with recording of top search resultsto a data file, he may view his journey in information space e.g. bywatching the recording in fast forward afterwards in the evening. Thisis quite an entertaining and informative feature e.g. in a foreign city.

It should be noted that multiple passive search queries could be on atthe same time in parallel. A person needing a haircut, and wanting tobuy a purple pullover, could enter both the haircut and the purplepullover as separate queries into his mobile station, which will thendynamically search for both items as the user moves with his mobilestation around the city and as time goes by.

It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the mobilestation 30 and associated systems can be freely permuted and combinedwith embodiments 10, 20, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordancewith the invention.

FIG. 4 demonstrates an embodiment 40 of the inventive mobile stationwhen at least one short range communication link of the invention is inuse. In this embodiment the mobile station 400 is accepting incomingBluetooth- and/or WLAN-signals, or other short range signals on variousfrequencies. The user is still on Fabianinkatu. The signals that are inrange are Rivoli, Zucchini, Eqvitec, Fabian, Suinno, Bank and Kämp.These are all businesses and/or organisations that are within a coupleof blocks from the position of the user, and so can reach the mobilestation of the user with their signals.

The user has “Hotel” inputted as a query term. The mobile stationsoftware searches the information pages in the incoming signals, andquite quickly deduces that only Fabian, Rivoli and Kämp are hotels. Themobile station software lists these on the hit list 440, with the hotel“Fabian” that had the best match to context parameters ranked first, asexplained with embodiment 30.

The mobile phone software then accesses the information pages via theshort range communication link, and pulls up the reservation page of thehotel Fabian and displays it on the mobile phone screen. Naturally theseweb pages need to be accessible through the short range link asinformation pages. In this embodiment the mobile station typically needsto download information pages via the short range information links tomemory or cache memory, search these information pages and rank the bestmatches onto the hit list 440 in accordance with the invention. In thisembodiment at least one search engine of the mobile station would beused to conduct the searching.

In another embodiment, at least one query term is sent from the mobilestation via the short range communication links, and the computerssupporting the short range links only send those pages with matches tothe mobile station for further ranking and listing on the hit list 440.In this embodiment the computer that is arranged to transmit at leastone information page conducts the search with at least one searchengine. In some embodiments at least one search engine is used both atthe computer and the mobile station in accordance with the invention toconduct all or some of the composed search queries.

In some preferred embodiments the web pages of the organizations hostingand/or using the transmitters are simply broadcast via a short rangecommunication link in addition to the Internet. In some preferredembodiments the mobile station reads and searches both the incominginformation page signals and the Internet to deduce the hit lists 340and 440. In this embodiment for example the hit lists 340 and 440 wouldbe merged into one hit list, with hotel “Fabian” quite probably beingranked first. It should be noted that the use of the said short rangecommunication connections such as WLAN and/or Bluetooth is many timesfree, where as access to the cellular networks incurs fees. Therefore insome embodiments the mobile station is arranged to prefer the cheaperoption, which many times leads to the short range connection beingpreferred over the cellular connection, when information can betransferred via either channel to obtain the desired outcome. In someembodiments the short range connections are searched first, and thecellular network is used for queries only if no matches are found in theshort range connections.

Quite clearly booking a hotel room is not a limiting example, but theinvention can be used to transact any products commercially ornon-commercially.

In some embodiments it is possible to record the hit lists 340, 440 asthey change as a function of time, so that the user can later view whatmatches in the information space his journey has included.

The relevance alarm of the mobile station discussed earlier is alsoapplicable with short range communication links and information pagestransmitted with them. Provided at least one search result reaches acertain relevance level, the mobile station produces a sound, lightand/or vibration signal.

The click-through rate of an information page at a certain location iscollected by the information page transmitter computer system itself,and broadcasted to the mobile station in one embodiment. In analternative embodiment the mobile station may look up the click-throughrate from another computer in the network and/or the Internet.

It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the mobilestation 40 and associated systems can be freely permuted and combinedwith embodiments 10, 20, 30, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordancewith the invention.

FIG. 5 demonstrates an embodiment 50 of the inventive communicationsystem as a network diagram. The user is using the subscriber terminal500, which is typically a mobile station, mobile phone or a computer,such as a PC-computer, Apple Macintosh-computer, PDA-device (PersonalDigital Assistant), or UMTS- (Universal Mobile TelecommunicationSystem), GSM- (Global System for Mobile Telecommunications), WAP-(Wireless Application Protocol), Teldesic-, Inmarsat-, Iridium-, GPRS-(General Packet Radio Service), CDMA- (Code Division Multiple Access),GPS- (Global Positioning System), 3G-, 4G-, Bluetooth-, WLAN- (WirelessLocal Area Network), and/or WCDMA (Wideband Code Division MultipleAccess)-mobile station. Typically in some embodiments the subscriberterminal is a device that has an operating system such as any of thefollowing: Microsoft Windows, Windows NT, Windows CE, Windows Pocket PC,Windows Mobile, GEOS, Palm OS, Meego, Mac OS, Linux, BlackBerry OS,Google Android and/or Symbian or any other computer or smart phoneoperating system.

In some embodiments the subscriber terminal has a GPS transceiver and/orreceiver, and it uses the GPS satellite system 520 to deduce itslocation. Other satellite systems for locating the subscriber terminalmay be used as they become available in accordance with the invention.The GPS satellite system typically outputs the latitude and longitudeco-ordinates, but in some embodiments it may also output the height ofposition above earth surface to reveal whether the subscriber terminalis in an aircraft, elevator, skyscraper or the like.

In some embodiments there is no separate satellite system available forlocating the subscriber terminal In some embodiments the telephonynetwork 530 is a satellite telephony network that locates the subscriberterminal also. In some embodiments the telephony network is a cellularnetwork, and the location of the subscriber terminal is deduced bytriangulation, cell identity and location of the cell where thesubscriber terminal is currently, or read from any network register suchas HLR (Home Location Register) and/or VLR (Visitor Location Register).

The user 550 accesses the Internet 540 and a Search Engine 510 via thetelephony network 530. In some embodiments the search engine is aconventional search engine such as Google®, Yahoo®, AltaVista®, Lycos®,Baidu® or the like. The telephony network is typically a cellularnetwork such as UMTS- (Universal Mobile Telecommunication System), GSM-(Global System for Mobile Telecommunications), GPRS- (General PacketRadio Service), CDMA- (Code Division Multiple Access), 3G-, 4G- and/orWCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access)-network.

The location co-ordinates are typically converted to at least onenatural language address at the subscriber terminal 500, and/or over anetwork computer that is accessed via the telephony network 530. In someembodiments the network server doing the co-ordinate→addresstransformation hosts or is connected to a search engine 510. In someembodiments the network server 531 is accessed via the Internet 540, insome embodiments it may be accessed via a closed network, such as forexample a VPN Virtual Private Network or a telecommunications operatorcontrolled and/or operated network.

In some embodiments the subscriber terminal 500 is arranged to outputlocation coordinates to the search engine 510 directly, which isarranged to conduct the translation to natural language identifiersindependently.

The at least one natural language address is then used to compose atleast one search query. In some embodiments user specified query wordsare added to at least one query. In some embodiments parameters that arederived from the file system of the subscriber terminal 500 are addedand/or used to modify at least one search query. The at least one searchquery is then sent to the Search Engine 510 over the telephony network510 that searches the Internet 540 for relevant documents matching thesaid at least one search query.

In some embodiments the search engine deduces the location of the mobilestation from information available in the network, such as WLAN/WIFIidentities, or cellular base station identities or triangulation usingbase stations. In some of these embodiments only the user specifiedquery term is required to be transmitted and/or delivered from themobile station to the search engine.

In some embodiments there are multiple search queries and the searchengine executes multiple searches based on said queries and composes anaggregate list of the matching documents.

The co-ordinate→natural language address transformation may result inmultiple addresses and thus multiple search queries in accordance withthe invention. Likewise any search query may also be synonym expanded inaccordance with the invention, for example by splitting e.g. Hotel,Helsinki, fabianinkatu, to two queries, the original: Hotel, Helsinki,fabianinkatu and the synonym expanded: Hotel, Capital of Finland,fabianinkatu.

In one embodiment the user is browsing for opportunities within a rangeof, say 200 m, from his location. This of course leads to multipleaddresses within that range and thus potentially multiple search queriesin accordance with the invention. For example if fabianinkatu 13 inHelsinki is the mobile station's current location, addresses onunioninkatu and kasarminkatu will be within 200 m range. If the usertypes query word “hotel”, the inventive mobile station will convert thisto three queries: 1) Hotel, fabianinkatu, Helsinki 2) Hotel,unioninkatu, Helsinki 3) Hotel, kasarminkatu, Helsinki. These querystrings may be searched in parallel or in series, and the aggregatesearch results from the three queries are consolidated into one list insome embodiments. In more elaborate embodiments the street numberranges, such as fabianinkatu 23-1 within the desired distances couldalso be incorporated into the queries, by having the number range, orone query each for each street number, as explained before andconsolidating search results.

In some embodiments there is also a search engine in the subscriberterminal 500. This search engine can be used to search the file systemand/or memory of the mobile station in some embodiments. In someembodiments a search engine and/or database in the subscriber terminalis used to conduct the co-ordinate→natural language addresstransformation at the subscriber terminal in accordance with theinvention.

It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the system 50can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 40, 60,70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

In some embodiment the mobile station only receives the at least onerelevance score and/or metric from the search engine. It is alsopossible that the mobile station software is used locally to compute arelevance score, for example to use contextual local data parametersand/or save data traffic resources in accordance with the invention. Inboth of the aforementioned cases, and other alternative implementationsthe relevance can be used as a measure as to whether to initiate asound, light and/or vibration alert with the mobile station.

FIG. 6 demonstrates an embodiment 60 of the inventive communicationsystem when at least one short range communication link of the inventionis in use. Examples of short range communication links are Bluetooth,IrDA and/or WLAN, but other options might also be available for theinventive implementation.

As the user 650 moves with his subscriber terminal 600 that comprises atleast one search engine the subscriber terminal receives short rangecommunication signals from information page transmitter devices 610,620, 630. These devices are typically computers equipped with or accessto and/or connected to at least one short range communication link, suchas Bluetooth, IrDA, NFC (Near Field Communication) and/or WLAN or thelike. These computers and links typically transmit the pages that theiroperators, hosts, and/or controlling organisations want them to.

In some embodiments the information pages that are transmitted aresimply the web pages of the sender. Information page transmitter mayread the information pages to be sent from the same folders that hostthe web pages in some embodiments, or it may read the web pages to bebroadcast from a different folder on a network computer or on a localcomputer.

The search engine in the subscriber terminal 600 will typically accessthe information pages via the short range communication link, and searchthe information pages with at least one search query. In otherembodiments merely the query is sent to the information page transmittercomputer, which receives the query, searches its pages and returnsmatching pages via the short range communication link. The advantagethat the latter embodiment has is that less material needs to bedownloaded to the subscriber terminal 600.

It should be noted that the short range communication link is a specialembodiment in that it is known that the transmitter is nearby from thecommunication type itself. There is therefore less of a need or no needto locate the subscriber terminal as location information isintrinsically known. In some embodiments the search query used to searchthe information pages omits location related data: it only contains userspecified search terms and/or terms derived from the context and/or filesystem of the subscriber terminal.

In a preferred embodiment the systems 50 and 60 work in parallel, i.e.information pages received via short range communication links andInternet pages are searched simultaneously with same or different searchqueries in accordance with the invention. As the subscriber terminalmoves, time passes by, or the user changes his query, or the contextdata or metadata change by the deletion or addition of data in themobile station, the search queries change, short range communicationlinks fall out of range and come into range, and new matches aredynamically updated to the aggregate hit list of both hit lists 340, 440on the subscriber terminal screen in accordance with the invention.Naturally both embodiments 50, 60 can be implemented in the same mobilestation, to work separately or together, and in parallel or in series.

In a preferred embodiment of the invention the embodiments 50 and 60 arecombined, and the relevance alarm (sound, light and/or vibration) isused for relevant search results obtained by searching information pagesvia short range communication links and/or the Internet. This embodimentmay also optionally but preferably feature the storing of click-throughrates for search results at a certain location, at a certain time rangeand/or associated with a certain user specified query to measure theconsensual relevance of search results obtained from information pagesvia short range communication links and/or the Internet. The said clickthrough rates are optionally but preferably used to rank the searchresults in relevance and/or allocate relevance scores to said searchresults.

It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the system 60can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

FIG. 7 demonstrates an embodiment 70 of the inventive processing methodused for example with the electronic page selected with the inventivebrowsing method. The invention can be used to just passively view pagesof information. However, this embodiment relates to the situation wherethe user and the page provider have an interaction and exchangeinformation, for example in a commercial transaction. In phase 700 anelectronic form on the page is filled automatically by the mobilestation and/or network server software. In one embodiment this happensso that the entry fields on the electronic page are identified and thetext descriptor associated with them. For example if the electronic pagehas an entry that is titled “First Name” the First Name is searched andpossibly also synonym expanded against data in the subscriber terminalAs the subscriber terminal is registered, to say the inventor, from theregistration data, it can be searched that the “First Name” matches with“Mikko”. Consequently, the mobile station and/or network server softwareenters “Mikko” into this entry field. The same process is repeated toall other entry fields from the same or different data source, such aslast name, address, telephone number, credit card number, customerloyalty card number and so on.

In some embodiments the data is already at the server, for examplebecause the user has filled the form before, and has been issued ausername and/or a password. In these embodiments the subscriber terminalsoftware can auto-register by automatically filling username and/orpassword and logging in. In some embodiments the subscriber terminal maylog the user onto the server and provide identification information bysubmitting phone number, credit card number, bank account number and/orpassport ID, all of which are typically unique and can be used to deduceother personal details of the user.

In phase 710 the user adds data in some embodiments. For example in oneembodiment, at least one entry field is always left unfilled. This is toensure that the user correctly fills at least one entry field in person,so that unknown people do not submit fraudulent information with theauto-fill feature or that the mobile station does not accidentallysubmit automatically filled forms without the user becoming aware of theprocess. For example, in one embodiment, especially when the electronicform involves a commercial transaction and a payment, the user is askedto enter as PIN number, the PIN number of his payment card and/or thesecurity code on his and/or behind his payment card and/or the PIN inthe mobile station and/or SIM card.

In phase 720 after the form has been submitted a copy of the filled formis captured in a file, for example a PDF file in some embodiments. Anyother file format is also in accordance with the invention such as animage file format such as JPG, PNG, or other document formats such asPostscript and the like in accordance with the invention.

In phase 730 the file that contains the form is sent to a remotecomputer. This remote computer is a computer server that in someembodiments belongs to the employer of the user. In phase 740 relevantdata is searched from the form and stored by archiving software in someembodiments. The form and the file can also be stored as a backup inaccordance with the invention in some embodiments. In some embodimentsthe extracted data is stored and processed in a book keeping and/orfinancial software such as NetVisor® or the like.

It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the method 70can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,60, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

FIG. 8 demonstrates an embodiment 80 of the inventive processing methodused with an electronic page, for example selected with the inventivebrowsing method. Say the invention is used at Heathrow airport asdescribed with the earlier embodiments by a person stepping out ofimmigration, and deciding to proceed to central London after the flight.He types “train to London” to his mobile station, and the Internetand/or incoming short range communication signals are searched. Thesearches reveal options listed in the hit list 810 on the screen.

Now as the search results show all available train routes and theirtimetables, the user can choose the preferred route and transport optionwhilst he is approaching the different train stations.

The user chooses Heathrow Express, and the reservation page of HeathrowExpress is accessed, and the reservation form is partly or entirelyauto-filled by the mobile station software. In some embodiments the usercan fill the reservation form also himself. In the example of FIG. 8 thesingle ticket to Central London (Paddington) is selected, and thereceipt for that ticket and possibly a separate ticket itself is sent byreturn via the Internet and/or via the short range communicationconnection in accordance with the invention.

In some embodiments the form is filled via e.g. Bluetooth and/or WLAN,and the payment of the ticket is conducted via an NFC (near fieldcommunication) link.

It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the method 80can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,60, 70, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

It should be noted that generally for search to be effective, there aretwo overriding criteria: The searcher needs to search diligently, andthe thing being searched would need to be available for finding.

Consequently, the invention will work a lot better with companies andorganizations that design their web pages better, to reflect a “let's dobusiness in the next 2 minutes on the spot” scenario. If we observeHeathrow Express webpage at the time of the invention, the inventivesearch method would need to parse and combine several web pages to getto the flexibility and availability of information shown in FIG. 9. Thetime tables are on different pages to the booking prompt or do notexist, and there is no news on when the next train is about to depart,except that it will be in 15 minutes. Instead the webpage is litteredwith infomercials: John Lewis department stores is teaching people howto pack, and providing vouchers. However the inventive storing ofclick-through rates at a location, and their use in composing relevancescores greatly relieves this need to design better web pages.Irrespective of badly formulated queries and poor web page design forsearch engines, if there is a strong consensual relevance evidence byhigh click through rates at that location, the search engine can dig abadly written webpage even with mistyped query: At heathrow, when usingthe invention and typing “tran” the Heathrow express webpages come upfirst, because a high percentage of mistyping people at hurry atHeathrow click through to the Heathrow Express web pages with thisquery, even though the web pages themselves do not feature any tags toattract mistyped queries such as “trin” “tran” “tain” or the like.

The reservation system would of course benefit from a greater timeresolution than 15 minutes, but this would require the web page operatorto publish the prospected departure times from Heathrow or London inreal time on a web page, as the trains move in real time so that the webcrawler software can find the information. Obviously, the web crawlercannot find information that simply is not there. For time sensitiveinformation the web pages contain a tag and/or generate metadata thatalerts the web crawler to revisit the page frequently enough to maintainsufficient time resolution in some embodiments of the invention. In someembodiments of the invention the search engine providers could evencharge a fee for these tags and/or metadata. However, a more practicalsolution is to use the click-through rates and the consensual relevanceranking of the invention as discussed earlier.

Adding time and space criteria proposes new challenges and improvementsfor the search engine itself. Address related information is expressedas keywords, so in some embodiments the addresses are handled asnormally by searching matches with keywords using synonym expansions,other query term expansions, and other prior art techniques, many ofwhich are discussed in references in detail.

However, current search engine technology has a bit of a difficulty withopening times, departure times, i.e. searches where relevance isdynamically changing. For example, the reader recalls the user from theSummary—section of this application, walking on Piccadilly with the“walkbrow” invention of this application on in his mobile station.-->TheRoyal Academy of Arts would not be a very relevant match on the hitlist, if it would not be open to the public at the time of the walk.

FIG. 9 shows an embodiment of index 90 in accordance with the inventionwhich may be used for example by a search engine of the invention. Theindex is represented by a matrix where documents (doc_(x)) are relatedto their keywords (kw_(x)). In a prior art matrix the vector space istypically binary, i.e. the entries are either 0 or 1, depending onwhether the keyword occurs in the document and/or is associated with thedocument or not, or real value weighted as discussed with FIG. 1.Needless to say, a present day index can be humongous, for example theindex used by Google, Yahoo, or other large search engines quiteprobably has one or more indices comprising millions of entries.

The index of the invention is time and/or space sensitive. This can beimplemented in a multitude of ways in accordance with the invention. Wewill consider the temporal case first. Assume Doc₁ relates to web pagesof a café that is open from 8 am-6 pm. The index 90 contains a vectort_range in one embodiment that specifies whether the café is open at thetime of the query. In a practical use scenario user uses the inventivemobile station to launch the query “café” in the postcode area of thecafé at 7 pm. The mobile station, network computer and/or search enginewill calculate a real value weight or binary weight in [Doc₁, t_range]element which is arranged to increase or decrease the relevance of theDoc₁ documents to the query from said mobile station. Typically the factthat the facilities are open for business carries a heavy relevanceweight, with closed facilities ranked irrelevant and thus low, and openfacilities ranked high in some embodiments of the invention. In thiscase the café is closed so [Doc₁, t_range] should have a value that islow.

In some embodiments the [Doc_(n), t_range] is just added to real valueweights of Doc_(n), and its value is chosen so that Doc_(n) will rankhigh when the facility is open and relevant, moderately high whenrelevant and closed, and irrelevant and open, and irrelevant and closedfollow in this order of relevance.

One option to acquire the values to the t_range vector is to use webcrawlers to crawl the web pages for opening times and time ranges,especially when they occur together like “open mon-sat 7-4” from webpages, instead of not entering them into the index. If the opening timesare in image format, OCR can be used by the web crawler to scan theinformation and thereby retrieve it. The time of the query is typicallythe time at which the query occurs e.g. 5 pm, or if the query itselfcontains the time e.g. “table for 7 pm?”, that is the time of the query.So if the query is “Table?” at 5 pm the mobile station will showrestaurant vacancies close by that have a free table now, but if thequery is table for 7 pm the mobile station display will show vacanciesof restaurants close by at 7 pm, even if current time is at 5 pm inaccordance with the invention in some embodiments. Similarly thelocation of query can be the current location and/or the location in thequery in some embodiments of the invention.

Also indexes with a location vector and also location and temporalvectors are in accordance with the invention. Most location basedidentifiers have natural language descriptors that are intensivelyindexed already by the prior art web crawlers. It is the temporal datathat is not indexed sufficiently for the “walkbrowsing” described inthis application. This problem is also alleviated with the calculation,estimation and/or storage of click-through rates as a function oflocation of user's mobile station, current time and/or at least onecurrent query term. The click-through rates are typically stored in asearch engine server computer or a search engine server computernetwork, where the click-through rates can be used to compute relevancescores and rank search results.

Existing web crawlers such as LibWWW Robot of the W3C Consortium, orPerl based crawler interface by Gisle Aas or Parallel UserAgent by MarcLangheinrich, or the Visual Web Spider by Newprosoft.com could beinventively modified with the above improvement to supply the timesensitive data from web pages to the search engine of the invention. Theadditional inventive software in the Visual Web Spider, or any prior artweb crawler crawls & scans for opening time related words and numbers.In some embodiments, these data are placed in the t_range column or thelike in the inventive search engine and index relation.

It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the embodiment90 can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 40,50, 60, 70, 80 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

Lastly let us look at FIG. 10 that shows an embodiment 91 of theinvention as a network diagram. The search engines at the subscriberterminal and/or the network compose and manage at least one indexrelationship. The subscriber terminal (600) gets its location from theGPS satellite system (520) or the cellular network, and this istranslated to at least one natural language address or range ofaddresses in the address database (910, 920) on the subscriber terminalor the network. The natural language addresses become query terms thatare searched against the keywords in the index (arrows 1 a, 1 b, 1 c),to discover matching documents on the Internet or information pagetransmitters (arrows 2 a, 2 b, 2 c, 2 d). The most matching documentsare listed to the user dynamically, and as the subscriber terminal movesand time goes by, or the user enters/changes a user specified searchterm, this activity is repeated to deliver the most relevant documentsto the screen of the subscriber terminal (600). Quite clearly as queriesget split and expanded to several parallel queries, and as theparameters change with user motion and time, there will be a lot morequeries executed at a higher frequency than in conventional mobilesearch use today. The future might hold that a user walking on a streetgenerates a hundred queries every 50 m. However, this increased trafficwill allow users to identify interesting documents and real lifeopportunities spontaneously with less amount of effort than ever before.

It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the embodiment91 can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 40,50, 60, 70, 80 and/or 90 in accordance with the invention.

The invention has been explained above with reference to theaforementioned embodiments and several commercial and industrialadvantages have been demonstrated. The methods and arrangements of theinvention allow people to scan opportunities passively in theinformation space as they traverse through space-time in their owncontext, and receive an alarm of only relevant search results in thephysical proximity. The invention facilitates on-demand effortlessMobile Short Range Search that allows the users to access opportunitiesthat they did not know about, or would not have had time to find outabout, with minimum effort and cost as the software of the mobile phoneis scanning the Internet and information pages for these opportunitiesand displaying the results dynamically on the mobile phone screen. Theinvention improves search engine performance for Mobile Search, as theinventive method takes into account the consensual nature of mobilesearch at a specific location.

The invention has been explained above with reference to theaforementioned embodiments. However, it is clear that the invention isnot only restricted to these embodiments, but comprises all possibleembodiments within the spirit and scope of the inventive thought and thefollowing patent claims.

REFERENCES

-   Finding Out About—A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine    Technology and the WWW, Richard K. Belew, Cambridge University    Press, ISBN 978-0-521-73446-2. Edition 2008.-   WO2009/022356 A2 Method and System for SMS-based Electronic Form    Processing, Gadiraju et al.-   WO 02/39765, “An electronic short messaging and advertising method    and means”, Mikko Kalervo Vaananen.-   EP09168388.8 & PCT/EP2010/061611, Method and means for data    searching and language translation, Mikko Kalervo Väänänen.

1. A mobile search method, comprising: providing at least one mobilestation with a communication network connection, and the mobile stationlocation is determined, and said mobile station connects and/or isconnected to at least one communication network of at least one computer(100); conducting with said at least one search engine at least onesearch in at least one said mobile station file system and/or theInternet and/or a file system in the said network with said location asa search parameter (130); and storing a click-through rate from a userand/or mobile station location for at least one search result.
 2. Anetwork server (531), arranged to receive location data from at leastone mobile station and/or determine location of said mobile station(100), wherein at least one search engine is arranged to conduct atleast one search in at least one said mobile station file system and/orthe Internet and/or a file system over a network with said location as asearch parameter (130), and a click-through rate from a user location isarranged to be stored for at least one search result.
 3. The networkserver as claimed in claim 2, wherein any or all of phases (100, 110,120, 130, 140) is arranged to be conducted automatically, and atransition from any of the following: phase 100 to phase 110 and/orphase 110 to phase 120 and/or phase 120 to phase 130 and/or phase 130 tophase 140 is arranged to be automatic or all of the transitions arearranged to be automatic.
 4. The network server as claimed in claim 2,wherein the network server (531) is arranged to receive a user specifiedterm by text input or speech from said mobile station (550) and saidsearch results are ranked based on said at least one user term and atleast one said street address.
 5. The network server as claimed in claim2, wherein at least one webpage that is listed in said search results isarranged to be provided to the user (550) for accessing (240).
 6. Thenetwork server as claimed in claim 2, wherein at least one search resultis a webpage with an electronic form and the mobile station softwareand/or network server automatically fills one or more entries on theelectronic form based on data in the memory and/or data storage of themobile station and/or network server (240, 820).
 7. The network serveras claimed in claim 2, wherein the mobile station stores and/or prints afile of the search result and/or filled electronic form and stores saidfile (70).
 8. The network server as claimed in claim 2, wherein saidfile is arranged to be stored and/or sent to a different computer overthe network (730), and data in said file is arranged to be inputted intofinancial and/or archiving software (740).
 9. The network server asclaimed in claim 2, wherein as the mobile station changes locationand/or time goes by, the location data and/or time are arranged to beupdated automatically and a new search is arranged to be conductedautomatically based on changed location data and/or time (150).
 10. Asoftware program product arranged to determine the location of at leastone mobile station (100), wherein at least one search engine is arrangedto conduct at least one search in at least one said mobile station'sfile system and/or the Internet and/or a file system over the networkwith said location as a search parameter (130), and a click-through ratefrom a user location is stored for at least one search result.
 11. Asearch engine with an index relation, wherein the index is arranged tocalculate a numerical weight to an association between at least onelocation and/or time of an incoming query and at least one document. 12.The search engine as claimed in claim 11, wherein the search engine isarranged to rank documents associated with facilities that are open forbusiness at the time of the query higher than documents associated withfacilities that are closed at the time of the query.